WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT THE ROMANIAN DIALECT OF MOLDOVA IN THE LAST HALF CENTURY.

The Romance language spoken in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic and later the Republic of Moldova has been studied for nearly half a century. The Soviets characterized this Bessarabian dialect of Romanian as a separate Eastern Romance language for political reasons, as they feared the development of cross-border pan-Romanianism. Western linguists, beginning in the late1970s, wrote of this linguistic obfuscation and uncovered the Cyrillicized plagiarism of Romanian textbooks and grammars used in the Moldovan school system. Due primarily to its century-long contact with Russian and Ukrainian, the dialect of Romanian spoken today in Moldova has departed considerably from standard Romanian in its lexicology, phonology and to some extent, even in its grammar. The characterization of the Moldovan idiom today as the Moldovan language or a dialect of Romanian continues to carry political and sociological ramifications [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]